Đề thi IELTS Reading ngày 22/2/2025: Passage 2 The discovery of a baby mammoth; Passage 3 Rebranding art museums
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2.
The discovery of a baby mammoth
A near-perfect frozen mammoth offers clues to a great vanished species
A On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, looking carefully at a diminutive corpse. Although he’d never seen such an animal before, Khudi had seen many mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found each summer, and this persuaded him the corpse was a baby mammoth. It was eerily well preserved. Apart from missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Khudi realised the find might be significant and knew he couldn’t just return home and forget all about it. He therefore decided to travel to the small town of Yar Sale to consult an old friend named Kirill Serotetto. His friend took him to meet the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuribey River to collect the baby mammoth.
B Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions coincided with the end of the most recent Ice Age, many researchers believe that the primary cause of the great die-off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically altered the vegetation. “We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a significant part in their extinction,” says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth expert at London’s Natural History Museum. “In Eurasia, the timing of the two events matches closely.” The extinctions also coincided, however, with the arrival of modern humans. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to blame as the temperature rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.
C The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the St Petersburg Zoological Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum’s director, was one of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued ‘the best preserved mammoth to come down to US from the Ice Age’, and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after Khudi’s wife. Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely, other than the missing hair and toenails, the only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba’s anatomy: her milk tusks. Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came from the Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene temperature change. On the other hand, Pleistocene era: the time between roughly 2.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at their peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when humans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It also showed that the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in St Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki, Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba. During these, Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been indicated earlier by the scan. In fact, the sediment in Lyuba’s trunk was packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was created in the base of her trunk, which would have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba’s death were clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence for drowning than asphyxiation.
F Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her well-preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from North America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba’s premolars and tusks revealed that she had been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
Questions 14 – 18
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet.
- similarities between studies of mammoth remains from different parts of the world
- details of the uses to which mammoth body parts were put
- a theory that accounts for the damage to Lyuba’s face
- an explanation of how an individual was able to identify a small corpse
- a comparison between Lyuba and other young mammoth corpses
Questions 19 – 23
Look at the following statements (Questions 19–23) and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A–G.
Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 19–23 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
- The indications are that mammoths died as a result of climate change.
- Teeth analysis is important in discovering why mammoths died out.
- The corpse of the baby mammoth is in better condition than any other that has been discovered.
- It would be a mistake to ignore the baby mammoth’s discovery, because of its potential importance.
- Mammoths often died at a time of year when they should have been in good physical condition.
List of People
A. Yuri Khudi
B. Kirill Serotetto
C. Adrian Lister
D. Alexei Tikhonov
E. Dan Fisher
F. Bernard Buigues
G. Naoki Suzuki
Questions 24 – 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24–26 on your answer sheet.
- Some researchers say that a marked rise in temperature impacted on mammoths by changing the type of ………
- Fisher concluded that many of the mammoth tusks he looked at displayed signs of ………
- Not long after Lyuba’s death, the Mammuthus primigenius group she belonged to was replaced by another group that came from ………
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3.
Rebranding art museums
A study of the reopened National Gallery of Victoria
As anyone with even a passing interest in cultural institutions will know, art museums are adapting to keep up with changes in society. Do any of these newly developed spaces indicate a fundamental shift in the ways we engage with art at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The answer is a qualified ‘Yes’ and also, it must be said, ‘No’. A clear sense of this can be gained by considering the 2003 redevelopment of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, in the light of the aspirations embodied in the original building that served as its template.
The first building was considered a thoroughly modern museum when it opened to the public in 1968. We should not forget that it was also bold, entrepreneurial and innovative in ways that have done great credit to the vision and foresight of the architect, Roy Grounds. For one thing, the 1968 building signalled a strong sense of engagement with Asian and Pacific cultures, both in its architecture and through the layout of its collections. Its entrance lobby was designed to facilitate the rapid and efficient circulation of visitors. It also contained a series of greatly expanded temporary exhibition galleries and a vast Great Hall, which represented an unprecedented emphasis on the ancillary roles of corporate functions and public performances in the contemporary museum.
This last feature might have seemed excessive to some, yet how wise it has proven over the years as museums have come to place increasing emphasis on corporate sponsorship, and on the need to generate additional funds via room hire. Furthermore, the Great Hall has for forty years provided an area for children to roam at large before being escorted through the much less spatially accommodating galleries themselves. As an unintimidating introduction to the lifelong rigours of visiting art museums, its impact on attendance cannot be overestimated.
At the same time, other aspects of the 1968 NGV have not withstood the test of time so well. Foremost among these are the huge expanse of the exterior’s windowless wall and the surrounding moat, which creates a rather unwelcoming expression of the museum as a temple of culture set apart from the everyday world. Over time, this idea has been questioned, and has been superseded by the growing impetus towards the alternative model of the museum as a more open-ended and visitor-friendly forum that engages the public more effectively.
With these considerations in mind, Mario Bellini’s redeveloped NGV opened in 2003 and his design reflects what the new, improved, twenty-first century global museum feels it should be emphasising to its visitors. Here the institution’s energies are focused, not so much on the technical subtleties of how to design the galleries themselves, as on presenting to the public a spectacular image of the museum itself as a welcoming yet efficient facilitator of social interaction, popular entertainment and public knowledge. All of this is certainly impressive, but where has the art gone? We are not allowed to see the exhibitions until we have completed the necessary inductions. We are greeted by a hugely expanded cloakroom screening off our vision to the right, followed by a large visitor information office leading to the ticket booths. Above us is the cafe and to our left we cannot escape the NGV shop set alongside the exit.
And what of the redesigned galleries themselves? In fact, they represent a wonderfully elegant reframing of the permanent collections in ways that should offer first-time visitors and seasoned members alike many new avenues for engagement in the years to come. But herein lies the conundrum posed by the NGV renovation and by the global sweep of new museum projects more generally. The mainstay elements of a permanent collection can become all too easily lost in the increased prominence that these rebranding exercises tend to place on the more glamorous spectacular aspects of the institution itself. At its most extreme, this results in the construction of new buildings that supplant the artworks inside them to become the major attractions themselves.
These challenges are most keenly felt in the area of the temporary exhibition. Entrance to the NGV permanent collection is now free, so the NGV needs something to keep the paying public coming back. The answer lies in the international ‘blockbuster’ exhibition. The Impressionists, for example, netted a total of 380,000 visitors, making it one of the most popular exhibitions in Australian history. There has also been, it needs to be said, a commendable attempt to leaven the international masterpieces with selected highlights from the permanent collection. Overall, though, the prevalence of these ‘rental’ blockbusters cannot but help introduce a certain ‘off the rack’ feeling to the institution’s exhibition programme. More importantly perhaps, they clearly narrow the options for other worthy but less glamorous projects, and they take energy away from the curators’ potential to do further work on and around the permanent collection itself.
Yet the show must go on, and shows can’t exist without the public. Even the most adroit organisation, as the NGV assuredly is, needs to be able to juggle numerous, often conflicting priorities: the need to advance scholarship, on the one hand, versus the imperative of access on the other; the need to introduce audiences to new areas, versus the necessity of luring them in with instant brand recognition. Nobody said it was going to be easy, and the effect of too much innovation in museums can be disastrous.
Questions 27 – 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 27–30 on your answer sheet.
- What is the writer doing in paragraph 1?
A. comparing the old NGV with the new NGV
B. describing the role of art museums in Australian culture
C. considering the influence of gallery design on art appreciation
D. suggesting there has been a recent change in gallery design - The writer criticises the old NGV because
A. the permanent collection was poorly displayed.
B. the building tended to make art seem remote.
C. Asian and Pacific art was neglected.
D. the foyer resembled a shop. - What does the writer notice about the new NGV?
A. He thinks the ticket booths are well positioned.
B. He is upset that he is made to move so quickly.
C. He is frustrated because the art is obscured by the entrance.
D. He thinks the redevelopment fails to keep up with international trends. - The writer argues that rental ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions
A. should be cheaper.
B. are a financial necessity.
C. should be increased in number.
D. allow the museum to present an original programme.
Questions 31 – 35
Do the following statements agree with the claim of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 31–35 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts with the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
- Roy Grounds’s design failed to recognise the importance of functions and performances in museums.
- Mario Bellini’s new NGV rejects international museum design trends.
- Mario Bellini’s work on subsequent museum projects has been less successful than that on the NGV.
- The NGV monitors the number of first-time visitors to permanent collections.
- Too much change may have negative impacts on museums.
Questions 36 – 40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–G, below.
Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 36–40 on your answer sheet.
- If a large space is available in the museum,
- If children are allowed to move freely in parts of the gallery,
- If too much emphasis is placed on the museum building itself,
- If there is an over-reliance on ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions,
- If the NGV wants to continue to be successful,
A. the museum programme will lose its individuality.
B. the museum will lose credibility.
C. the art loses its importance.
D. it will have to balance opposing demands.
E. this will encourage museum visitors in the future.
F. it will have the capability of increasing revenue.
G. the architect’s reputation might suffer.
